


curtains close on a kiss

by nosecoffee



Series: strange estrangement, nothing here is real, nothing here is right [1]
Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Children of the Corn, Crack, F/F, Fluff, He could murder me and I'd say thanks, I blame my friends, M/M, Magic Realism, Mentions of orgy, Mermaids, Morph Suits, Multi, Pulling a Crucible, Sacrifices not taken seriously, Witches, i love Jughead so much, this is a mess, weird friendships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-10
Updated: 2017-04-10
Packaged: 2018-10-17 07:13:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10589049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nosecoffee/pseuds/nosecoffee
Summary: "Why is this a conversation we're having?" Betty questions."We're all tied to a tree, and if Archie doesn't sprint, one of us will be used as a virgin sacrifice by some loon?" Jughead suggests."Fair." Veronica says.(Or the AU where the citizens of Riverdale think mermaids exist, some kids are witches, and virgin-sacrifice-rituals are the norm)





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title from 'Where Do We Go From Here?' From Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Once More With Feeling.
> 
> I blame Parker and their comment 'consume a soul and continue' when I sent them the first section with no context

"Please tell me that this kind of thing doesn't happen on a regular basis in this town?" Veronica says.

Betty actually can't blame her, as they are currently tied to a tree. "I'd hate to lie to you."

"Are you fucking kidding me?" The raven-haired girl spits, kicking the dirt with her already mildly-scuffed heel.

"'Fraid not." Betty sniffs.

"How are you so calm about this?" It's a good question, and Betty sighs, fingering the rope around her midsection, effectively binding her against the trunk.

The blonde shrugs. "I'm kinda used to it by now. It's been happening since I turned fifteen."

"Okay, one; that's really, seriously creepy. Two; you're only seventeen now." Veronica points out.

"I know." Betty replies, nonchalant.

"Betty..." She rolls her eyes and breaks a bit of bark from the tree, holding it up for inspection.

"It's okay, I'm gonna get us out of this." Betty promises.

"Please do." Comes a voice to her right and there she sees a third person she was unaware of.

"Jughead? What are you doing here?" She questions, he shrugs, looking about as calm as Betty feels.

"You guys thought you were the only ones kidnapped for this ritual? Y'all think you're the only virgins in town?" He has several good points.

"Oh, is that what it is?" Betty sighs, and it makes sense.

"Is that why Archie is nowhere to be found?" Veronica murmurs.

"I texted him, he's on his way." Jughead assures them, and Betty drops the bark-shard.

"You know what, explains the deaths." She comments.

"Why do you think we're the only ones here?" Veronica asks them, sounding a little calmer than before, at the promise of rescue.

"Every other not-quite-an-adult-yet in town is either too young to be sexualised, and rightly so, or not a virgin. I'm just guessing." Jughead replies, voice even, calm, maybe even a little bored.

"Sounds about right." Betty agrees.

"You know," Veronica begins, and she's using that voice that she only uses when she's addressing Jughead, "I actually thought you weren't."

"Really." Jughead snorts.

"Yeah. Couldn't tell you why, but I thought so." The raven-haired girl continues.

"I see." Jughead nods, Whoopee cap scraping against the bark in a way that makes Betty wince.

"Why is this a conversation we're having?" Betty questions.

"We're all tied to a tree, and if Archie doesn't sprint, one of us will be used as a virgin sacrifice by some loon?" Jughead suggests.

"Fair." Veronica says.

~

"What the fuck?" It appears to be Veronica's signature saying, nowadays as she fixes Archie and Betty with a pointed look. "Has no one in this town seen _'Children of the Corn'?_ You do know that what you're suggesting is literally the plot to _'Children of the Corn',_ right?Next thing you know, you're gonna be telling me that they moved the headstones, but not the bodies."

"No, but on Halloween a couple years ago someone dug up all the graves in the graveyard. They didn't take anything, or open the caskets. Just dug 'em up." Archie tells her, a pleasant look on his face. Veronica gives him a look that she hopes conveys _'you better not be pulling a_ "Children of the Corn" _on me.'_

"C'mon, it'll be fun. We'll go out to the fields outside town and star gaze and shit." Betty begs. "Jughead's coming, too."

"Is this what all small-town-teenagers do? Are there not enough bars in this town that you can safely sneak into? This is why Stephen King wrote so many horror stories about small-town-teenagers. And small towns in general. Y'all are crazy." Veronica tells them, fingering her pearls, absentmindedly.

"Are you coming or what?" Archie asks, a finite tone in his voice as he pushes a picnic basket into the back of the pickup he's borrowing for the night.

"Alright, _All Dark, No Stars._ I'm coming, lemme grab my cape from inside." Veronica relents.

"And you say we're weird, at least we don't wear capes." Betty calls from the pickup, a giggle in her voice.

"They're coming back into fashion!" She calls back, and refuses to meet Fred's eyes as she grabs her cape from where it's draped over the back of the couch, because God forbid he find out what she did to Archie on that couch.

~

"I want you to tell me in short words and quick sentences that no one in this goddamn town actually believes that there are mermaids in this river." Veronica states from behind her stylish shades and black sunhat.

"Ronnie, you know that ain't true." Jughead tells her from his place, lying beside the river.

She sighs, feet in the shallows. "Everything in this town is absurdly set up for the start of a horror movie. I don't get how anyone survives here."

"Oh, neither do we." Her companion laughs. "There's at least one mysterious death per month."

"Good god." Veronica whispers.

"In retrospect, Jason's nothing special." Jughead continues.

"How many of those deaths are mermaid-related?" Veronica questions, only half-joking.

"A good fourth of them are claimed to be." He informs her.

"And how many are virgin-sacrifice-related?" Veronica counters.

Jughead peers at her over the top of his book. "The other three quarters."

"Jesus Christ." Veronica murmurs, laying back on the compact sand of the riverbank.

"What are you guys talking about?" Archie calls from where he's floating by.

"Mermaids." Veronica informs him, earnestly.

The redhead takes this in stride. "Seen any?"

"Nope, but we'll be sure to let you know if we do." Jughead calls to him, a fond look on his face.

"What a moron." Veronica mutters. Jughead shrugs, not too fussed with the comment, but a little miffed.

"Watch it, that's my moron you're insulting there." He laughs. Veronica likes it when he laughs. Jughead very rarely smiles, so a laugh is doubly as good.

"My sincere apologies, but I'm not exactly wrong."

"He grew up with the craziness of this town and everything that ensues. Can you blame him?" The boy in the Whoopee cap inquires.

"No?" She responds, but the lilt at the end of the word gives her away.

"Would you say the same is it were Betty?" It's almost cheating, what he says, but she holds herself back from saying it.

"Betty wouldn't say something like that." Veronica says, sure that this is true of her girlfriend-kind-of-not-girlfriend.

"Answer the damn question." Jughead snaps, fondly, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth.

"No, I wouldn't." Veronica concedes.

"Well then, what makes it okay to say it about him?" Jughead gestures to Archie, floating down the river, slowly, speaking to Betty, where she's perched on a rock, reading what appears to be _All Dark, No Stars._ Leave it to Betty to take a swimming trip and use it to catch up on the reading she doesn't want her mom to see.

"He's legitimately searching for mermaids right now." The raven-haired girl points out.

"I'm gonna remind you that less than two months ago you were kidnapped for a virgin-sacrifice and he's the only reason you're still here." Jughead announces, swiping the bottom of his nose with the pad of his thumb.

"How do you know they'd have chosen me?" Veronica cries, turning around, a vaguely offended look on her face. It clears up at his uncontrollable grin.

"Just a hunch." He assures her. Veronica leans back against him. It's nice.

"When's the next virgin-sacrifice thing gonna happen?" She asks him after a long moment of silence, just her back pressed so close to his thin chest that she can feel his heartbeat in her shoulder blade.

"I'd give it another solid five weeks." Jughead says.

"Oh good." Veronica mumbles, sarcastically.

~

"Betty Cooper, I swear to god." Veronica spits.

"Look on the bright side; at least it's not a virgin-sacrifice." Betty responds, but her heart isn't in it. Veronica can tell.

"Betty, we're all legitimately tied to stakes in the towns square. People are legitimately holding torches and pitchforks. I'd take a virgin-sacrifice over this, any day." She tells her.

"Ronnie." Betty sighs. Veronica watches her droop, and that's not good. If they have any chance of escaping this, they need an operational Betty. She's still pissed, though, so the likelihood of her actually doing that is slim.

"Don't 'Ronnie' me. I blame you for this." She snaps.

"Technically, it's also Jughead's fault-" Betty says, standing up a little more.

"Whatever, I blame him too." Veronica says, dismissively.

"It was a joke!" Jughead protests. "It was fun! You gotta admit it was fun!"

"Dancing, orgasms, and then almost immediate arrest does not constitute fun, Jug!" She retorts.

Archie snorts. "Gotta admit though," he says, "the orgasms were good."

"That's besides the point, Archie. You're right, but it's besides the point. I hate small-town teenagers." Veronica continues, and she's actually so angry right now. The adrenaline she's getting from the idea that the citizens of Riverdale may well actually burn her at the stake for maybe holding an orgy in the forest is keeping her going. "And I never should have shown you _'Children of the Corn'."_

"Your loss, I guess." Betty shrugs in a way only she could while tied to a stake in the town square.

"We're all getting burned at the stake, Betty." Archie points out, to Veronica's right.

"Yeah. Solid point." Betty agrees, a little defeated.

"Wanna maybe make an intelligent statement that will tactfully get us out of this situation?" Jughead asks from Betty's left.

"'I'm sorry for holding a kind-of-orgy in the forest, and dancing around a burning camp-stove in the middle of the night in my underwear with three other teenagers, I'm not a witch, and neither are any of my friends, please don't burn us at the stake'?" Betty suggests.

"Something along those lines, yeah." Veronica murmurs, meeting her mother's eyes in the crowd. Her mother shrugs, in a way that says _'yeah, I did this too, don't worry.'_

~

"Betty." Veronica says.

"Yeah?" Comes the tired response to her left.

"We're going to college across the country, okay?" She states, and it's not much of an actual question, but she has to phrase it just-so because otherwise it'd be rude.

"Listen, I'm sorry-" Betty starts to say but Veronica's having none of it at this point.

"I'm really tired of being continually kidnapped out of my bed for virgin-sacrifices that never actually properly happen." Veronica tells them all.

"Ronnie-" Archie attempts to say but Veronica's actually fucking done.

"Don't they know that we've fucked? Or are they just really conservative, and don't believe in lesbian sex being valid?"

"That's not something you should-" Betty is interrupted by the sudden appearance of a person in green morph suit and a pair of sunglasses. Veronica struggles against the rope around her.

"YOU KNOW THIS IS REALLY HOMOPHOBIC! PENETRATIVE SEX ISN'T THE ONLY VALID KIND OF SEX, MOTHERFUCKER." She screams at them.

"Well, in that case, you're part of a blood-sacrifice, which also includes a virgin." Is the muffled response.

"I JUST SAID-" Veronica continues to rage but the person in the morph suit presses a green finger to her lips, silencing her. It's really creepy.

"A virgin, in this case," they say, "being someone who has not participated in any kind of blood ritual before."

"Okay, now Archie's presence makes a lot of sense." Jughead states from the other side of the tree.

"We've all participated in a blood-ritual before, though." Archie says.

"Have you?" If Veronica could see their facial expressions, she imagines they'd be shocked.

"Yeah. The night Betty's mom caught us having a rave/orgy in the forest and almost had us all burnt at the stake?" Jughead confirms.

"Oh, well, in that case, you're free to go." The figure unties the rope and then runs off into the dark forest.

"Was that Mayor McCoy?" Betty asks after a moment, rubbing her sore wrists.

"That sounded like Mayor McCoy." Archie agrees.

"Should we say something?" Veronica inquires. Jughead shrugs.

"Man, I think it would just be easier to stay quiet. Too much paperwork, otherwise."

**Fin.**

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading this trash, I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please feel free to leave a comment and/or a kudos, and track me down on Tumblr @nose-coffee.
> 
> Some other notes: check out @oopsiwroteathing, @angeburger, and @Lyxxie for more content that's a little more serious than this. All three of them work really hard on their fics and its great, go check them out.
> 
> I'm gonna go pass out, now. Thank you!


End file.
